Acidus wrote:

Now for the really scary part of this. I have read the above paragraph countless times before. The only difference is back then it said China instead of the government and people instead of minors. Why don't you congressional ass clowns try to "understand the behavior" of my right to privacy or the term of illegal search and seizure!

[ Boy. Histrionics all around.

A) It's not congress, it's DoJ, so while you can certainly write your congressperson and tell them you'd like them to rein in Justice, you can't really blame them for this. Unless you're making a reference to the Child Online Protection Act, which is another story.

B) I could give a shit if the government or anyone else gets a list of things entered into the google search bar. They can even have graphs of frequency for all I care. What they can't have without a warrant is a way to tie any of that back to me. That means no IP address just as much as it means no names, and for that matter, i don't even think they should get locations/states. So I *am* concerned over the request for IP addresses. Arguing that IP addresses don't constitute "personal information" is disingenuous at best, so they can fuck off on that one. But the raw query strings themselves? Not so much a problem for me. That being said, I don't think that list, or the statistics that fall out of it, will really do them any *good* without the location data, which is the real reason the request is retarded.

In all honesty, I have a much bigger problem with all of this, which is that it reflects the DoJ's stated goal of spending a lot of time and effort on prosecuting pornographers. Ashcroft got the ball rolling, and then Acosta and Gonzales forthrightly declared this to be a priority. They've since proceeded to move against people under the revised Title 18 U.S.C. § 2257 law (requiring that anyone photographing a nude model acquire and retain from the model a signed statement that they're over 18, in essence).

There's an argument for § 2257, though I think it's mostly a thinly veiled attack on the entire industry, with little regard to actually protecting minors. The real problem is that Justice has been spending a lot of time going after "obscene" material, unrelated to child pornography. (see, for example http://www.traditionalvalues.org/modules.php?sid=1145 and http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1125318960389). As that latter article indicates, going after material they know not to feature minors seems to be a tremendous waste of government resources that ought to be conducting investigations into corruption back home in Washington.

[EDIT]
I should have added that I understand fully the precendent-setting issues here, and so yes, Google did the right thing because even if this request was innocuous, later ones may not be. I really don't care who has this trivial data, but I should have followed up by saying, "unless it leads to requests for nontrivial data".

There's a pretty full analysis here : http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060119-060352

RE: DoJ sues Google for failing to turn over records!